


Culture Clash

by WhiteFoxKitsune (ProwlingThunder)



Series: The Everlasting List of Shenanigans [129]
Category: Invasion America
Genre: Gen, Humans, Training, Tyrusians, culture clash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-09
Updated: 2014-10-09
Packaged: 2018-02-20 11:12:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2426663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProwlingThunder/pseuds/WhiteFoxKitsune
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt!Fill.</p><p>Jim learns he's the victim of cultural assumptions. That explains <i>so much</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Culture Clash

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ZpanSven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZpanSven/gifts).



> Prompt: Awkward

Jim watched David stalk across the tree branches with the grace of a panther, incautious and certain of himself, confidant in his abilities and balance, even more then a good thirty feet in the air. As he watched, Amy moved with the same natural, deceptive grace across wide branches, though closer to the ground then her brother.

Rafe's teachings. Jim himself was balancing across fallen tree trunks, surefooted and his balance centered, but he knew that he didn't have their fearlessness, or their quick recovery. He had seen David take a tumble before, and climb back up none the worse for wear. Besides, from this vantage point, he got to track their progress. Up, down, from ground to crown to rock like some sort of paramilitary perversion of a jungle gym.

Even before the whole alien business, Jim had known enough about Rafe to know it was exactly what it looked like. Though Jim had never been quite so high as they before, he had run their courses with them on Maple Island before. The only reason he was not up there now was because someone had to keep a watch out.

Ever since they had made it here, here being Turquoise Mesa, David and Amy had been flocked by the locals.

They were convinced David was single-- which he was-- and that Amy was married-- which she was-- and Jim himself had been carefully singled out to be avoided. Sometimes he caught site of them throwing him pitying or apologetic looks.

“Jim.” David landed beside him in a crouch, whisper-light, touching the ground with the fingertips of one hand. Jim turned to him, muscles tense with surprise, but David only reached up to brush a long strip of blue-black behind one ear. Non-threatening. Jim frowned at him, then glanced up briefly to hunt out Amy's lithe frame, barely showing of her pregnancy. She was making her way down the branches of a sturdy pine tree, each chosen branch tested gingerly before she rested her full weight on it, as if she wasn't entirely sure what would hold her now with the added mass. “We should head back.”

Back, to the Ooshati camp and dinner. Jim detested the suggestion already, and David must have recognized that somehow, planting a hand on his back to lead him in that direction. Amy joined them beneath an oak branch so low Jim could almost touch it.

It wasn't really that he didn't want to go eat, just that he didn't want to sit through all those looks, and people flirting with David, and people asking where Amy's husband was. “Do we have to sit with them?”

“It will be okay,” David soothed gently, patting his back. “Amy and I have mostly cleared up the widower thing.”

Er...? “Widower thing? What thing?”

David grinned, a wide and honest thing that showed all his teeth. There wasn't a hint of deception or apology, but at the same time, Jim wasn't sure the smile was meant for him, either. “Your hair. It's short, so they think you're wife just died.”

“What?”


End file.
